Page 97 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

86 Prasun Sonwalkar
mosque needed to be replaced by a grand temple of Lord Ram. In the late 1980s,
before the mosque was demolished, the ‘sangh parivar’unleashed nation-wide cam-
paigns to mobilize people in favour of the temple and effectively used the mosque
as a symbol of a variety of (real and imaginary) grievances suffered by the Hindus.
Hindutva elements argued that the Muslim community had been favoured and
appeased by the Congress party that had mostly ruled independent India. In Gujarat,
as Chattarji (2004: 114) argued, there was a ‘mythic construction of wronged Hindu
majorities now wreaking vengeance to reverse centuries of Muslim barbarism and
atrocity, and the media is shocked at government complicity’.
The mosque was demolished by ‘kar sevaks’ in a frenzy on 6 December 1992.
The issue has since remained on and off the political agenda even as the BJP and
its allies, for the first time, went on to win political power in New Delhi under the
moderate BJP leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee (the BJP-led government had a brief
tenure between May and June 1996 and was then in office between March 1998 and
May 2004). During the clashes in Gujarat in 2002, the BJP was in power in Gujarat
as well as in New Delhi. Several of the BJP’s allies in the government did not
support the Ayodhya agenda, and the compulsions of power forced the Vajpayee
government to tone down its Hindutva rhetoric and try to build a political consensus
on constructing the temple in Ayodhya. However, this consensus was hard to reach,
since most political parties in India are opposed to Hindutva-oriented politics. The
issue continues to simmer in political discourse and tortuous legal proceedings,
while the VHP continues its work to sculpt pillars and other material to be used
when – and if – the construction of the temple is legally allowed to begin.
It was against this backdrop that the infamous events occurred in Gujarat in
February–March 2002. It all began on 27 February, when the Sabarmati Express
train carrying ‘kar sevaks’ was returning home from Ayodhya. They were return-
ing from a political ceremony organized by the VHP as part of its campaign to
construct the temple. At around 8 am, the train pulled out of the Godhra station
in Gujarat on the last leg of what was to be dubbed as ‘one of the most cata-
strophic rail journeys of post-Partition India’ (Varadarajan 2002a: 3). As the train
left the station, it was stoned by an angry mob and some 20 minutes later, one of
the coaches was burned to cinders along with 58 passengers, many of them later
identified as members of the ‘sangh parivar’. Why the mob gathered and attacked
the train has been the subject of much speculation and mystery. Inquiries into the
Godhra tragedy were yet to deliver their final conclusions in early 2005. The iden-
tity of the mob was not immediately known but local Hindutva leaders promptly
declared that the attackers were Muslims, and that the community needed to be
taught a lesson. Retaliation for the Godhra tragedy was swift with politically
mobilized mobs launching fierce attacks on Muslims in several parts of the state.
Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of the Gujarat government and a leading member
of the ‘sangh parivar’, tried to justify the attacks on helpless Muslims in
Newtonian terms: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
From 27 February there was barbarous violence for over forty days, as revenge
against the killing of ‘kar sevaks’ in Godhra. The official figure of Muslims killed
was 800 but the unofficial figure was over 2,000. As many as 200,000 people
were displaced because their homes had been burnt or looted. Property belonging